Sheena Iyengar Quotes

#1. As we get older, we get better at choosing in ways that will make us happy. We do a better job at picking activities that make us happy, and at spending time with people who make us happy. We're also better at letting things go.

Sheena Iyengar

#2. We're born with the desire, but we don't really know how to choose. We don't know what our taste is, and we don't know what we are seeing.

Sheena Iyengar

#3. You know, like, none of us would choose - no matter where we are in the world - would choose to you know become a member of Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" world, but how much choice is really the question.

Sheena Iyengar

#4. My child's first word was "more," but and it's all about, "I want." "I'm going to tell you what I want and what I don't want." It's about my desire to express my preferences. And that is really innate.

Sheena Iyengar

#5. In order to 'hold fast' to something, one must allow oneself to be held to something. That commitment may be one of the hardest things to practice in a world of so much choice.

Sheena Iyengar

#6. If you truly have expertise - and expertise can be say a chess master who has really mastered something or an artist or a musician of some sort you know if you give a jazz musician ...

Sheena Iyengar

#7. You know, whether it be humans or animals. So even humans - before we can speak or we can understand a baby's cognition - they're already showing us signs that they want choice.

Sheena Iyengar

#8. So for decisions about happiness you essentially need at least both and probably even more than that, you probably also need to do analysis that doesn't involve yourself to get at the answer of what will make you happy in 10 years.

Sheena Iyengar

#9. The expansion of choice has become an explosion of choice.

Sheena Iyengar

#10. The typical Walmart today offers you 100,000 products.

Sheena Iyengar

#11. You know if they said kindness or funniness was really most important to them then they will be more likely to say yes to the person that they thought was kind and funny.

Sheena Iyengar

#12. What leads us astray is confusing more choices with more control. Because it is not clear that the more choices you have the more in control you feel. We have more choices than we've ever had before.

Sheena Iyengar

#13. Choosing is a creative process, one through which we construct our environment, our lives, ourselves.

Sheena Iyengar

#14. People who perceive the negative experiences in their lives as the result of uncontrollable forces are at a higher risk for depression than those who believe they have control

Sheena Iyengar

#15. Being a Sikh meant having to do what Mom and Dad said, and going to temple, and Mom and Dad choosing who I would marry. But going to an American school taught me that I was the one who's supposed to make those choices.

Sheena Iyengar

#16. When I was in Russia I found that I thought I was going to give these people that I was interviewing a whole bunch of choice in terms of what they could drink while we were chatting.

Sheena Iyengar

#17. What we found was that of the people who stopped when there were 24 different flavors of jam out on display only 3% of them actually bought a jar of jam whereas of the people who stopped when there were 6 different flavors of jam 30% of them actually bought a jar of jam.

Sheena Iyengar

#18. We all make assumptions about the world - based on individual experience and cultural background - that affect our judgment of how that balance should look

Sheena Iyengar

#19. I mean we know that some choice makes you better off than no choice. Now do we get better off if we go from a lot of choice versus a few choices? And there I think the answer is much, much, much more complicated.

Sheena Iyengar

#20. I mean we might even go to war as to whether we love Coke or Pepsi and our whole identity is wrapped up in that choice. You know, for the Russians they felt that these minor differences between these various sodas was just hyped up and irrelevant.

Sheena Iyengar

#21. How did people end up confusing the fear of falling to their death on the jagged rocks below with the feeling of being struck by Cupid's arrow?

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#22. What's interesting is that the way we go about finding our marriage partners today is quite different from the way it used to be in this culture.

Sheena Iyengar

#23. I went home and they seemed ... my parents seemed normal. They didn't seem to feel like somehow they had been victims of some Nazi camp or something.

Sheena Iyengar

#24. When companies try to guess what consumers want, they essentially make the choice for consumers.

Sheena Iyengar

#25. What you see determines how you interpret the world, which in turn influences what you expect of the world and how you expect the story of your life to unfold.

Sheena Iyengar

#26. We also don't always know what we want. And in those cases it can actually make us worse off because it's actually easier to figure out what you want and to figure out how the options differ if you have about a handful of them than if you have a hundred of them.

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#27. I put out a good 10 different types of drinks for them and they just said, "Oh, okay, so it's just one choice." One choice? I gave you Coke, Pepsi, Ginger Ale, Sprite. They saw that as one choice. Now why was that one choice? Because they felt, well, it was just all soda.

Sheena Iyengar

#28. I mean it wasn't that they sat around thinking oh gosh I needed more choices in my grocery stores the way I had come to think about it as an American growing up.

Sheena Iyengar

#29. Rather than trying to trick ourselves, we can teach ourselves, avoiding temptation until the act of avoidance itself becomes habitual and automatic. III.

Sheena Iyengar

#30. We are sculptors finding ourselves in the evolution of choosing, not in the results of choice.

Sheena Iyengar

#31. About the only time our gut can truly outperform our reason is if we truly have developed a kind of informed intuition. So that means the chess master or someone who has really thought about it and given themselves feedback on a particular activity for at least 10,000 hours or more.

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#32. When we speak of choice, what we mean is the ability to exercise control over ourselves and our environment. In order to choose, we must first perceive that control is possible.

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#33. I mean can you walk to school on your own? Can you study science? Can you study math? Can you go to a normal school? Do you need to go to a special school? What is going to become of you when you grow up? Are you going to have to live on social security and SSI?

Sheena Iyengar

#34. There is a different attitude about, you know, how much differentiation there needs to be between our options and how many choices do I need to have in order to make a choice.

Sheena Iyengar

#35. First-generation children were strongly influenced by their immigrant parents approach to choice. For them, choice was not just a way of defining and asserting their individuality, but a way to create community and harmony by deferring to the choices of people whom they trusted and respected.

Sheena Iyengar

#36. I could wear makeup today, and one person would say it looks bland, another would say it looks fake, and another might tell me I look really natural. Everyone is convinced their opinion is the truth, and that's what I struggle against.

Sheena Iyengar

#37. When people are given a moderate number of options (4 to 6) rather than a large number (20 to 30), they are more likely to make a choice, are more confident in their decisions, and are happier with what they choose.

Sheena Iyengar

#38. Too many choices can overwhelm us and cause us to not choose at all. For businesses, this means that if they offer us too many choices, we may not buy anything.

Sheena Iyengar

#39. When you lie about yourself, is it to appear closer to or farther away from the middle of the bell curve?

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#40. When I was very young, my background as a Sikh-American made me aware of the tensions that underlie choice.

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#41. People don't put as much of an emphasis in expanding their choices, so that, you know, one of the things that I learned when I was in Japan way back in the 1990's and there were all these quarrels happening between the U.S. and Japan about allowing more American products into the Japanese market.

Sheena Iyengar

#42. A person of "good character" was one who acted in accordance with the expectations of his community

Sheena Iyengar

#43. What we share with animals is a desire for choice. It's a desire to have control over our life and a desire to live and use choice as a way in which we can facilitate our ability to live and that is something we really were born with.

Sheena Iyengar

#44. [Americans] think that choice, as seen through the American lens, best fulfills an innate and universal desire for choice in all humans. Unfortunately, these beliefs are based on assumptions that don't always hold true in many countries, in many cultures.

Sheena Iyengar

#45. I didn't really give them anymore than one choice, soda or no soda. They didn't ... whereas we put a lot of stock in the differences between soda ...

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#46. We make choices and are in turn made by them.

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#47. We have the ability to create choice by altering our interpretations of the world.

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#48. Like, people are less likely to invest in their retirement when they have more options in their 401K plans than when they have fewer.

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#49. Now if you expand their choice set. Say you give them 20 different speed dates, everything goes out the window. Everybody starts choosing in accordance with looks because that becomes the easiest criteria by which to weed out all the options and decide "So who am I going to say yes to?"

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#50. Knowledge should be a public good, and I want my ideas to have as much exposure as possible.

Sheena Iyengar

#51. The higher the exposure a product receives and the greater its perceived social acceptability, the more people will buy it, which in turn further increases its exposure and acceptability.

Sheena Iyengar

#52. Balancing hopes, desires and an appreciating of the possibilities with a clear-eyed assessment of the limitations: that is the art of choosing.

Sheena Iyengar

#53. A clear right answer and the opportunity to change the options? This is the chooser's dream.

Sheena Iyengar

#54. The typical American reports making about 70 [choices] in a typical day.

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#55. Once the jazz musician learns all the fundamentals they can keep track of a lot of choices in an instant.

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#56. We began to look at "Why is that?" And a large part of that has to do with the fact that when people have a lot of options to choose from they don't know how to tell them apart. They don't know how to keep track of them.

Sheena Iyengar

#57. In America we tell our parents to bring their child home and put him or her in a crib; as they get older, children sleep in they own room not in Mom and Dad's room. What are we training them for? It's independence, because that's what being empowered is all about.

Sheena Iyengar

#58. The key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing.

Sheena Iyengar

#59. There are times when the presence of more choices can make us choose things that are not good for us. For me the clearest example is that the more retirement fund options a person has, the less likely they are to save for their old age.

Sheena Iyengar

#60. We are often in society told to make decisions in one of two ways. We're either told "Use your gut, just go with how you feel about it and let that guide you," or we're told to use reason - some very deliberative methodical process of pros and cons and really thinking it through.

Sheena Iyengar

#61. You know give me choices that are truly different from one another, otherwise they don't regard them as meaningful choices.

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#62. So most of the time when we are confronted by more, rather than a few, choices we're often novices and so we don't really know how to differentiate these various options.

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#63. Reason tells me, when I do the pros and cons analysis, how I should feel about it right now and how I should feel about it in 10 years from now and so that the only ...

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#64. So it was constantly going back and forth between these two cultures that kept raising the question, well, how important is personal freedom? And I think that has always been of interest to me.

Sheena Iyengar

#65. The phantasmagoria, the actual experience that we try to understand and organize through narrative, varies from place to place. No single narrative serves the needs of everyone everywhere.

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#66. We tend to have a knee-jerk negative response to anything that seems to want or have control over us.

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#67. We either put out 6 different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam and we looked at 2 things. First, in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam?

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#68. How much choice the animals technically had was far less important than how much choice they felt they had

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#69. So on the one hand in school you're teachers are constantly telling you that you can be whatever it is you want to be as long as you put your mind and heart to it, and yet at the same time I was also getting the clear message of, well, what can you do really?

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#70. I do think that there are cultural differences in the extent to which we value having more and more choice.

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#71. But in public school i learned that it was not only natural but desirable that i should make my own decisions. it was not a matter of cultural background or personality or abilities; it was simply what was true and right

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#72. Now to what ... ? How we teach people to make choices and the things they're going to make choices over - that is culturally learned.

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#73. in the words of George Bernard Shaw, marriage inspired by love brings two people together "under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions.

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#74. Then, the other thing that affected my interest in choices growing up was the fact that I was going blind and that meant that there were lots of questions that constantly kept arising about how much choices I actually could have.

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#75. The first thing we looked at, in what case were people more likely to be attracted to the jar or jam, so in which case are people more likely to stop when they saw the display of jams and what we found was that more people stopped when there were 24 jams.

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#76. Well certainly not having any choice - having your entire life dictated by others ...

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#77. People will make worse financial decisions for them if they're choosing from a lot of options than if they're choosing from a few options. If they have more options they're more likely to avoid stocks and put all their money in money market accounts, which doesn't even grow at the rate of inflation.

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#78. I think that too ended up affecting a lot of the different research questions that I later asked was really was about well to what extent ... How do we balance choice as possibility and choice as limitations?

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#79. I'm a great believer in the idea of not choosing based on our taste.

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#80. Consumers presented with six choices on an item were twice as likely to buy as consumers overwhelmed with 24 varieties of the same item.

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#81. So gut tells you "How do I feel about this right now?" It doesn't tell me how I feel about it tomorrow or even a few minutes from now. It just tells me how I'm feeling right now.

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#82. Choice is more than picking 'x' over 'y.' It is a responsibility to separate the meaningful and the uplifting from the trivial and the disheartening. It is the only tool we have that enables us to go from who we are today to who we want to be tomorrow.

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#83. I pick what are my priorities and I limit those priorities to less than five in my life and really in those particular areas put in the energy to try to make good choices.

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#84. In reality, many choices are between things that are not that much different. The value of choice depends on our ability to perceive differences between the options.

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#85. We measure our lives using different markers: years, major events, achievements. We can also measure them by the choices we make, the sum total of which has brought us to wherever and whoever we are today.

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#86. When I do have choice I try to be very picky about ... or shall I say choosey about when I choose. I don't automatically decide that I must be the one to choose or that it's important for me to make every choice in my life.

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#87. What affected people's health most in these studies wasn't the actual level of control that people had in their jobs, but the amount of control they perceived themselves as having.

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#88. Also if they choose from more options than fewer options they're less satisfied with what they choose and that is true whether they're choosing chocolates or which job offer to accept.

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#89. Personal happiness is always a very serious matter.

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#90. I don't know if I approach choice any differently than the sighted people do, but what I am very cognizant of is that choice does have limits and because of that I really try to take advantage of the domains in which I do have choice.

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